Sunday, 10 January 2016

Lithuania 2016 - Vlad Max - Don’t Wanna Let It Go

Pity poor Vlad Max, here. He looks like a nice enough kid, and his intro video gave him the lustre of a cool and moody electropop waif. But then the camera cut to the studio to reveal a skinny lad with sticky up hair wearing the same expression as a baby deer who's about to be hit by a truck. Wide-eyed, trusting, but it still knows something bad's about to happen.

The moment poor Vlad started to sing, his whispy, left-of-key voice made you want to hug him and punch him in the face at the same time. It's also never a good sign when your own backing singers can barely stifle the giggles, bless him. And then came the words: "Everybody says that they know you well, they've seen you here before and they know you smell". Abso-bloody-lutely priceless!

And all of this is a shame, because he had probably the most chirpy and memorable song out of a mostly uninspiring Lithuanian bunch.

But the heart break didn't end when his song did. The first glance at the scoreboard shows him to be well-adrift at the bottom of the table with a measly 42 points. Surely a lad of his age has more than 42 friends? Surely his own mother could have texted in more than 42 SMS votes in three minutes? Unsurprisingly, he failed to qualify, with the lowest score from both the jury and the televoters.

Poor, poor lad. Let's hope he's not dissuaded from having another go next year, because we can see Apocalypse and him having a long and fruitful relationship. We love you, Vlad Max!

8 comments:

When I first heard this song, I thought it was a reject from the Swiss NF, one of those entries by a bedroom composer who has never performed in front of an audience before. It doesn't appear to have been a Swiss entry, but the rest of it seems likely.

LOL. Well I wrote the song and can I just clarify that its 'your smell' not 'you smell' hahaha. The idea is that he's found out about someone cheating on him / being where they shouldn’t be… 'Everybody says that they know you well, they've seen you here before and they know your smell' - its not the best line, but we had to rush the song to meet the deadline so it had to do.

Also, he had a huge problem on the night with his in-ear monitoring so he couldn’t hear himself sing - hence the flat notes. Trust me he doesnt sing like that normally and we wouldn’t have taken him to the competition if he did. Those backing singers were unprofessional and rude - they knew he sang it fine in rehearsal and perhaps if the male backing singer hadn’t gone AWOL right before Vlad was due to go on stage (completely killing the vibe and making Vlad much more nervous for his first TV performance as the crowd got irritated) then perhaps things would have been a bit better.

He knows just a few people in Lithuania and is completely unknown there as a singer, as he left for Ireland and then the UK aged 12. His own Mother couldn’t even vote as she lives in the UK and you can only vote from inside Lithuania! So the 109 votes he got in the end, especially when the performance went so wrong, wasn’t too bad. He’s a nice boy with a dream of entering Eurovision and I tried to make that happen for him. Sadly the abuse he has had online from other contestants and (particularly) Donny Montell fans is nothing short of disgusting. I feel quite protective because I know he worked bloody hard and in rehearsal he was spot on.

Nice work, unknown songwriter! These are the kinds of comments that we like on here! Thanks for filling us in on the backstage news!

It was clear from many of the other performers that the sound was a bit dodgy on the night - although strangely it seemed to right itself for the performers who finished in first and second place. For what it's worth, I really enjoyed the song - it's been going around in my head all morning... although I'm struggling to change 'you smell' into 'your smell'!

Tell Vlad that there's a lot of love for him in the Eurovision community after last night, and we hope to see him again next year!

Thats ok, its a pleasure! :) As always, there's a lot more that goes on than what is broadcast. I'm glad someone spotted how the sound righted itself for certain people!

Glad you enjoyed the song. It did get good feedback from all sorts of sources and I had hoped that the 'annoyingly catchy' approach might work but it seems that in Lithuania at least they want a bit of a safer bet, or a 'bigger' song. I'll be taking what I've learned and hopefully coming back with a few songs for Eurovision artists next year. And thank you, I will tell him that - he'll be pleased! He is a diehard Eurovision fan!

Apologies for my unintentional anonymity, although I'm logged into my google it showed up as 'Unknown' on your site! My name is Alex, but my stage name is Silver Darter. Think I might have fixed it now :)

Thanks for taking all this so well, chief. We're more here to encourage and gently mickey take than engage in all out heartless mockery, so I'm glad you've got the gyst of our thing. Keep in touch - we'd love to see what you do in the future!

I watched the show and really liked the song (not so keen on the singer but he was so sweet you couldn't dislike him). But as a song, well done. My favourite was the Petuniya girl, which was really excellent. But as far as songs were concerned, yours definitely should've made the cut.

Thank you! Yes Vlad is sweet, I hoped that might carry him through so he got another chance but alas, no. Apparently the song is still technically in the competition as it could be taken up by one of the other artists (I had to sign an agreement to this effect) however whether they will or not I'm not sure. Doesn't look likely! By the way, behind the scenes they weren't actually that keen on Donny's song - they were saying theres a Gypsy guy who has a really good song and apparently the public will vote on which song goes through at the end!

What's this blog for?

Every year, the Eurovision Song Contest chucks up some amazing songs, but only a tiny few ever make it through to the televised final stages. For the couple of dozen that make it to Eurovision proper, there are hundreds that fall by the wayside in the semi-finals and local qualification tournaments. And very often that is where the true gems are to be found.

So Eurovision Apocalypse is here to dredge the best (and occasionally worst) of them out of the musical nether regions, as well as some of the other greatest oddities the contest has thrown up over the last fifty-odd years.